In January of 1990, a friend and I designed the ultimate message to an alien civilization.

Okay, admittedly, this wan’t a recognized scientific accomplishment. After all, in January of 1990, I was a freshman at Williams. The alien message we designed was part of a first-year Winter Study seminar class. Winter Study, for those not part of the Cult of the Purple Cow is the one-month January term sandwiched between the Fall and Spring semesters, and at the time, first-year students were required to take one of a handful of interdisciplinary seminar courses intended to introduce students to a range of different disciplines.

Mine was called something like “Pictured From Outside” and involved faculty from English, Art History, and Astronomy (the last of these being the reason I picked this one). We read Frankenstein, talking about the creature as an outsider to human society, looked at some faintly voyeuristic paintings of dancers by Degas, and talked about SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, in case you’ve somehow managed to avoid that acronym).

I don’t really remember what the assignments for the art and literature portion of the course were, but the astronomy section featured a group assignment to design a message to be sent to an alien civilization. Students were put in pairs, asked to choose a message and write a paper explaining it, and then asked to swap “messages” with another group, and write a report on their choice. The definition of “message” was deliberately left vague, but specifically included both information transmitted digitally and artifacts delivered by unspecified magic technology.

My partner for this was a good friend from my “entry” (the term for the first-year residential groups at Williams), Dave Kensinger. We used to hang out a lot, and had bonded over similar tastes in pop culture and sports, shared dissatisfaction with a Political Science course in the Fall semester, and a general attitude toward the whole college thing. Which is not to say we were total slackers– I have a pretty healthy self-regard, but Dave was one of only a handful of people I met that year who made me wonder if I was out of my league academically.

Anyway, we paired up for this assignment, and quickly decided that most of the obvious options were kind of impractical. If you look at abstract messages like the famous Arecibo message, there’s a nice story about what it means, but given the raw message with no explanation, you’d be hard pressed to come up with any of that. We agreed that we could sort of babble about prime numbers and that sort of thing, but didn’t have a great deal of confidence in our ability to come up with anything that would actually be decipherable, particularly to aliens who didn’t already start with some basic knowledge of humanity.

And most of the less technical ideas were also kind of ridiculous. Sending great works of art is a hopeless muddle, requiring the recipient to somehow deduce the encoding format, and then interpret the result. It’s not clear to me that an alien species getting a radio message containing a Beethoven symphony would be able to distinguish it from a Picasso painting. And any kind of literary work runs into hopeless issues of translation.

So, we decided the whole assignment was a little ridiculous, and decided to choose something that would both be a legitimate message (we did, after all, need to pass the course) and highlight the inherent problems with this as a class assignment. We agreed that it needed to be an artifact, and eventually settled on what you see up in the “featured image” and just below: a Swiss army knife:

The ultimate message to an alien civilization.

We found two guys in the dorm who had pocket knives they were willing to let us borrow, and spent an hour or so in the library drawing up a list of things you could learn about humans if you somehow received a Swiss army knife and no other information. This included:

A rough sense of scale, in that the knife is made to fit a human hand, and the tweezers suggest we need help manipulating things at millimeter scale.

A rough sense of our level of technology, from the types and quality of metal and plastic used.

A rough sense of innate capabilities– i.e., that we don’t have razor-sharp claws, because we need to carry pocket knives.

An idea of the range of our visual perception, from the deliberate coloring of the red plastic, and the contrasting logo.

There are usually small bits of text cut into the metal, giving a very rough sense of our writing.

A vague sense of the cultural value of versatility, and that kind of thing.

Knowing a bit more about physics now, I’d probably add stuff like getting a sense of the planetary environment from isotopic ratios in the materials, and that kind of thing. With a more modern model including a USB drive, you could also infer some things about our semiconductor technology and computing capability, though at the time the state of the digital storage art was the 3.5″ floppy disk, so that wasn’t an option for us. We had a great time putting it together, and writing the whole thing up in a way that walked right up to the line without openly mocking the premise.

Our counterparts during the swap-and-critique part of the assignment were a couple of women who we already knew had kind of superior attitudes– more on the basis of socioeconomic class than academic prowess– so as far as we were concerned the whole thing was totally worth it when we handed them a pocket knife and said “Here, have at it…” (Their proposal was along the lines of “Send a digital copy of a set of encyclopedias” which we had a good time poking holes in.) We were even more pleased by the professor’s comments on the paper, which started off “At first, I thought you were just being flippant, but as I read through this, I realized you raised some really good points…”

(I’ll admit that there was no small amount of relief when I read that– it took Dave a while to talk me into the knife stunt, because I was uneasy about possibly offending the professor…)

I was reminded of this incident when reading my review copy of Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings (excerpt here), which has a bit about the Arecibo message that mentions the obscurity of its contents. None of the scientists shown the message at the time of its sending, according to Billings, was able to correctly interpret everything in it, and that’s starting from the huge advantage of being the same species as the original author.

So, it seems that while our original goal was largely to be flippant, Dave and I really did have a bit of a point. There’s a level of ambiguity to any radio message, due to problems with encoding it in a way that would be compact enough to send. A physical artifact can convey a huge amount of information, even when it’s not expressly designed for that purpose.

Related

Comments

Physical artifacts can yield quite a few hidden aspect of any culture. The Swiss army knife would reveal a lot about out metallurgical techniques. Stainless steel suitable for knife blades is tricky to make. Petroleum based thermoplastics and lubricants tell you quite a bit about our chemistry.

The odds are the steel is very slightly radioactive. Essentially all steel created after the advent of atmospheric testing is.

Another interesting artifact, and both a bit lighter and smaller, is the common Mini-Bic lighter. The rare-earth elements in the flint, the two colors of thermoplastic ultrasonically welded, the gas is butane with traces of others, electroplated chrome on mild steel wind guard, precision molding, the high precision balls that form the two valves. All that technology, several thousand years of it, brought together to create a primitive flame.

The Bic lighter also would give aliens the significant detail that we have both the ability and desire to start fires anywhere. An alien race familiar with the concept of smoked intoxicants will immediately grasp the significance, but that may not apply to all alien races. Such a race might conclude, incorrectly, that we use smoke signals for long-distance communication.

I hadn’t thought of it as an expression of visual perception. Just out of curiosity I went to the Bic site and looked up the mini-lighters. I didn’t know they had a designer series with animal prints. What would an alien make of a leopard spot or snake skin lighter motif? They might get the camouflage aspects but would they get the ironic and totemic references? Probably not.

And then thee is something I didn’t know existed, Clic, mini-electronic lighters. I wonder if this uses a piezoelectric spark device? Lots of neat technology in those. Pound on a special crystal oriented properly and you get a voltage spike. To do it reliably you need to know about crystal structures and electricity.

To do it reliably in such a small package takes a lot of technologies and, using so many different materials, implies a vast and highly organized logistical matrix.

It is also an odd mix of manual and automated. It is clearly designed to be used by some body part that can grip such a small thing and still manipulate it without getting burned. But it is clearly not designed to be directly manufactured or assembled by those same hands.

Does this imply a two-species society with one doing labor and the other enjoying the fruits? That might be one way of characterizing our relationship with the machinery and robots we use to create the BIc.

And then there is the near inevitable warning label with symbols, colors, adhesive technology, and a 58 word cautionary statement that one day might be the Rosetta stone of our planet. It includes a temperature “above 120F (49C)” , I left out the degree symbol, and time “30 seconds”. And includes: BIC USA Milford,CT 06460.

There is also, pressed into the metal” Made in France and the BIc logo and the Bic guy holding a pen. I figure they will naturally assume this is a military or hunter figure, possibly the God of war, holding a weapon. Will this cause them to assume we have disproportionally large and balloon-like heads?

Of course all this assumes they have something in common and can get a conceptual foot-in-the-door that allows analysis. I figure, based on how common our solar system and our planet is increasingly looking, we will have something in common.

Capitalism sells desire through working artifacts, a religion of flashy orgasms. “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend. Come inside! Come inside!” Then, we conquer the crap out of them.

The lighter also gives the aliens a hint that our atmosphere has enough oxygen to sustain a chemical reaction with the butane fuel. I think some of the cultural significance is a little overblown, however – the ability and desire to start fires anywhere isn’t readily apparent from a single lighter, and the smoked intoxicants bit is a real stretch (Eric’s post may have been sarcasm, though). Same with the animal prints and writing. They’re just random shapes that are much more likely to be misinterpreted than correctly interpreted. (The Rosetta stone only has value because it included both languages we knew and languages we didn’t.) I think it may say something about what we as a culture deem important, but that depends on whether the alien race believes we’d send something representative of our culture or deliberately designed to convey information, or something else entirely.

Swiss Army Knife: Brilliant. Though it might suggest a cultural bias in favor of cutting-tools as distinct from other types of tools, or something to the effect that humans needed to carry weapons with them everywhere.

What I thought would be an interesting message to broadcast, would be something conveying our decimal numbering system, plus the basic equations of Newtonian physics, accompanied by some kind of visual representation. Classical physics is one body of knowledge we can be virtually certain that every technologically capable society would have discovered. If the message was sent by laser, the fact of using laser technology would also demonstrate knowledge of quantum theory.

But here’s a wild idea: a space billboard (I just thought this one up, so it may be crap, but none the less…).

Use robotic devices to assemble small bits of space debris into a thin but rigid square sheet of size similar to the visible disc of the Earth. Place it in a stable orbit around the Sun and rotate it in a manner such that the square face of it is briefly visible from any viewing angle at least once during each period of rotation.

The shape plus the behavior would immediately suggest something highly likely to be an artifact, and would demonstrate that the culture that made it was a spacefaring society. It wouldn’t need to have any message spelled out with the material, though that might also be possible in a crude way, for example representations of our numbering system. For extra fun, use a 22:7 ratio of rotational period to solar orbital period.

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing